How far will the Lyon brothers go for Daddy’s love?
‘Empire’
8 p.m., Wednesday, FOX
3 out of 4 stars
This week’s episode of “Empire” returned to the show’s Shakespearean roots, even in title. “Poor Yorik” references the dead jester in Hamlet whose skull is dug up. There’s nothing more Shakespearean than dead bodies and family quarrels, and “Empire” had both this week.
We continue this week with Lucious’s obsession with being more “street.” As the FBI raids the Empire and everyone else scrambles to perform damage control, he instead insists this should be the time they roar. “Where we come from, if the cops raid your house, that makes you a G. If the FBI raids your house, that makes you an OG,” he says in the cheesiest and most Lucious line of the episode. Man loves to talk about where he came from while he walks around in suits that cost more than my car.
To present a united family front, Cookie and Lucious agree that Jamal and Hakeem should star in a music video together. Lucious’s theme for the video is a post-apocalyptic wasteland with Jamal and Hakeem starring as Blank Panthers. Jamal is wearing a beret, because of course he is. Jamal is also in the middle of doing a Rolling Stone profile, which also includes him getting painted by “the next Andy Warhol” for some reason. The artist brings the finished painting to the shoot, Lucious praises it, Hakeem can’t handle anyone else getting attention for more than 30 seconds and stabs the painting with a knife he just happened to have. Then he and Jamal get into a fistfight in the middle of the shoot.
This is classic Hakeem behavior, but to be fair, he’s been under a lot of stress lately, what with his dad stealing his artist/bang buddy and keeping all his music off the radio. Season 2 Hakeem has actually been a lot easier to stomach, mostly just because it’s easy to root for whoever is on Cookie’s side. “It’s me and you now,” he tells his mom this week. “We’re in this together.” Aw. Remember when she beat him with a broom because he was so terrible?
Jamal continues to be Jamal—obsessed with Lucious’s approval and suddenly lacking all of the qualities that made him our protagonist last season. But Andre has clearly hit his breaking point and decides he must dig up Vernon’s body to be accepting into Empire again. Bizarrely, finding out that Andre and Rhonda killed and buried Vernon makes Lucious “so proud” and he welcomes his son back into the fold. That is, until he finds out Rhonda is having a girl and Lucious sees that as the ultimate betrayal. Does anyone not see that coming? They’ve only mentioned that it has to be a baby boy every single episode.
Cookie gets taken into custody by the push-up bra prosecutor, who tries to get her to snitch on Lucious by threatening her kids. Of course, Cookie is above telling on her ex, but she’s not above completely giving the prosecutor a bad tip that will kill his radio deal. Win-win for Lyon Dynasty! And of course, Cookie is still icing Anika, which is a huge mistake, because that man would be powerless to stop a dynamic duo of his two exes. But maybe next season.
The episode ends with Lucious destroying a picture of him, Vernon and Bunkie with a lighter (off-screen, he probably deleted all their pics together on Facebook and Instagram). Prosecutor Boobs finds Vernon’s body in her car. Until next week!
Best lines of the week:
“Hey there, baby. Look wherever you like.”
“Tell me a grandma that got an ass like this.”
“Why you slithering around my son?”
“If I die in police custody, I did not commit suicide!”
“You need to kill yourself and that whack weave you got upside your head.”
“You know why I made Jamal the head of the company? Because he can do the work without his mama.”
“It’s your basic corpse detection system.” / “And you just have that handy?”
Lauren Chval is a RedEye special contributor.
